Natural Language Interaction (NLI) enables people to interact with any connected device using normal, everyday language. It understands the meaning of conversational input, and reacts accordingly, creating value and enhancing the user experience.

With NLI, bank users can converse with technology using complex sentences, containing multiple pieces of information and more than one request. There is no need for the user to repeat details during a conversation because memory, personal preferences and contextual understanding comes into play, just as it would in a conversation with a real person.

Our Natural Language Interaction technology has won many prizes for convincing humans that they are talking to another person. Whether the input is from voice, text, touch or gesture, NLI enables devices and applications to learn from every conversation, to understand the user’s intent, ask questions of its own and, of course – react intelligently.

How does Natural Language Interaction work?

Built for business people, the Teneo Platform follows three key steps to process and intelligently react to user inputs:

1.Analyze: First, it analyzes the user’s input using a robust linguistic understanding library to comprehend and derive the meaning. At this stage, it eliminates ambiguity. For example if the word ‘bank’ is used on a financial website, it understands the user is not referring to a mound of earth.

2.Reason: Advanced linguistic interpretation and business rules are then used to simulate ‘intelligent thinking’. This allows it to reason like a human and determine the most appropriate way to react, taking into account contextual factors such as the day of the week, user location, information from previous dialogs and data about the user retrieved from back-office systems such as CRM systems.

3.React: Finally it performs the necessary actions to achieve what it has determined as the most appropriate action. This might be giving a verbal or textual response, to ask for more information, open a webpage, play a video, open another app, automatically fill in a form or execute a transaction on backend or third party systems.

These three steps all happen seamlessly in milliseconds, with Teneo able to handle thousands of interactions simultaneously.

In order to avoid lengthy development timescales, escalating costs and highly complex computational linguistics, it is equally important the platform itself is intelligent and automated.

Delivering natural language applications to grow with your business requires a platfrom that is scalable, multi-lingual, device indipendent and seamlessly integrates with your back-end systems.

NLI should not be confused with Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) solutions which convert spoken words to text and is typically used for relatively simple applications such as keyword based voice interfaces. NLI utilizes ASR to ‘capture’ spoken word and then provides the ‘brain-power’ to analyze, reason and react to what is being said. You can learn more about the differences between NLI, TTS (Text To Speech) and ASR .

Why will NLI be business transformational?

Natural language will be as critical to your enterprise in 2020 as a website is today.

Meanwhile 24/7 connectivity is driving your customers to mobile for all their needs – work, home and play. Physical contact is lost as customer bypass interaction that is essential for building up cutomer experience, loyalty and sales.

You have got a website, if even works on mobile, but now your customer are into wereables, the Internet of Things and asking that clack box on the coffee table for advice on what to buy.

Questions are never asked in isolation. You want to monitor your expenses? Natural Language needs to be more then speech recognition, other factors such as context, memory, intelligent understanding and the ability to react appropriately must exisit.